Space Invaders review: the march that got faster as you won

A row of aliens steps left, drops, steps right, drops again. You slide a cannon along the bottom and fire upward. That is all there is, and somehow it was enough to make grown adults stand in line.

Winning makes it worse

The trick is in what happens when you are doing well. Each alien you remove makes the formation move faster, and the march music underneath speeds up with it. By the time a handful are left, the last one is racing across the screen and the music sounds like a heartbeat about to give out. The game does not punish mistakes as much as it punishes progress.

And there is a line you cannot let them cross. No matter how many cannons you have in reserve, if the invaders reach the bottom, it is over. So you are never just surviving; you are racing a clock that only you can speed up.

The last invader was always the scariest, because you had made it that way.

The bunkers are a choice

The cannon hides behind bunkers that get chewed away, by alien fire from above and by your own shots if you fire from underneath. Every player had a philosophy. Some drilled a small window through a bunker and fired through it. Some treated the bunkers as disposable. Some tried to keep them whole for as long as possible. The game let all of those work, just not equally well, and that is why people argued about it.

Then the mystery ship crosses the top of the screen, and for one second everybody forgets the plan.

What it meant back then

In America it turned up in arcades, but also next to the cigarette machine in a bar, in the lobby of a movie theater, and at the end of the aisle in a pizza place. Kids who had never seen a computer learned what one sounded like from that march. If you grew up then, you probably remember the sound before you remember the screen.

Playing it today

It is slower than you remember at the start and faster than you remember at the end. There are no power ups, no bosses, only a pattern you get a little better at reading every time. Play three games in a row and you will catch yourself planning shots, counting columns, and sweating over the last invader. That feeling was designed, and it still works.